


hand over hand

by inlay



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: F/M, Fest, Flash Forward, Flashbacks, Missing Scene, Scarif, The Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-09-25 18:27:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9838016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlay/pseuds/inlay
Summary: The inside of his cheek presses salt bright into his tongue. His eyes are open, and he's lying on a metal grill, contorted. His blaster is next to his hand. Breathing hurts, but he drags in a breath anyway, and it comes back.K2, first. Then the man in white. Then—Jyn, that last whirl of her face above him as he fell. The panic there. The plans clipped to her belt.(or, Cassian climbs, and is given a glimpse of something)





	

**Author's Note:**

> i had to stop and lie down for ten hours after writing every other line of this. rogue one has stolen my heart and my sanity. apologies for any inaccuracies with backstory or present story. i'm too emotional for accuracy

There's a woman.

There's a woman on a beach of ice, and her hair is in two twin braids, hanging limp on her back. She's very tall and the sun in front of her is very bright. It eclipses her from the head down, the outside in. She's a different woman now and there's no ice anymore and Cassian's chest hurts from yelling. He didn't know he was yelling.

He's on his knees in the sand.

****

Pain is the first thing to return; it defeats him before he even knows where he is. There's an ache like white noise that says something has gone wrong in his body. He tries to move—scrapes one leg backwards across the floor, and gets a new sear of pain that almost steals the consciousness from him again.

Cassian doesn't remember why it's important that he clings to that consciousness, but he knows it is.

The inside of his cheek presses salt bright into his tongue. His eyes are open, and he's lying on a metal grill, contorted. His blaster is next to his hand. Breathing hurts, but he drags in a breath anyway, and it comes back.

K2, first. Then the man in white. Then—Jyn, that last whirl of her face above him as he fell. The panic there. The plans clipped to her belt.

Cassian plants his hands on the metal and surges up. He can't get much farther than half-sitting, leaning heavily on his arms, but the pain is starting to clarify. He closes his eyes and catalogues; blaster wound in the side, bleeding sluggishly; sprained left elbow; sprained, dislocated, or worse right leg. It's probably broken, but his brain shies away from that thought. If K were here, Cassian knows what odds he would say.

Jyn. Her name has been something of a mantra in his head since he first met her. The questions that used to follow before—where is she, what does she really want, is she going to jeopardize the mission—have all been wicked away. He's down to the essentials, here alone. Jyn's alone too, and she's got the plans.

He looks to where the man in white had stood with his troopers, but there's no one there. They must have followed Jyn. Cassian doesn't know how long he's been out, if Jyn has been caught yet, if all of this was for nothing.

He pictures her limp on the ground, Imperial fingers on the plans, and he feels like he's falling again.

There's no time.

****

The first push upwards to grab onto one of the cartridge handles sends a wave of pain so heavy it feels like he's being crushed; his vision whites out for a split second, and when he's back, he's hanging from the handle, sweaty palm gripping so tightly his fingers are numb. His face butts up against the side of the tower. He's using all of his energy to stay upright.

Jyn in his head again, her on the platform on Eadu and Cassian's cold, unexplainable fear for her. Fear for her taking over from the fear of answering to her if her father died at his hand. Now there's just her face, eclipsing the fear. No; he has more energy. He has more in him. He pulls himself up, and the blaster wound in his side screams. He ignores it, and scrabbles for another handhold—finds it, and clings.

If shock has a chance to set in, he'll be done for. He glances once up to see how far he has to go—the tower narrowing dizzyingly towards a distant prick of light—and then he turns his face to the metal face of the data banks. He climbs.

On a mission on Coruscant, Cassian had once been pursued by Imperial spies who had hit him three times with their blasters—once in the leg, twice in the shoulder. He'd stayed alive and moving by focusing everything in him on the data stick in his uniform, full of details the Rebels needed to know about a coming Imperial attack, details he could give only if he made it back to the ship waiting on the launch pad. Now, it's Jyn and the plans that are the axis of his world. He's not hanging from the wall of data banks, he's hanging from the point of her belt.

His hands are shaking from strain and adrenaline; he misses the next hold he swipes for, and reels out away from the wall for a horrible, spinning moment before he gets his good leg against a handle and uses it to push himself back into the wall, shoulder wedged on the sharp corner of a data box. He's staring at the metal platform below, and he's come farther than he'd thought. There's blood spreading slowly far beneath him. It would hurt more to fall again.

Jyn has the plans and the man in white is after her. He has to climb.

“I know because it's me,” she'd said. Stardust. Cassian's mother had once taken him down to the frozen ocean on Fest and had him look up at the sky, and she'd told him they were all made of the same stuff as space debris and planets. He doesn't think he'd truly understood it until that moment with Jyn. The plans and her are swapping places and intermingling in his mind. Jyn. Stardust. She's shining, and the plans are morphing, data in the shape of Galen, the shape of Cassian's mother, the shape of Draven and his orders. Cassian has always been moulded in the shape of orders.

He thinks he's hallucinating. He climbs.

He's clinging to the side of the data banks, blaster thumping against his thigh in its holster. He's reaching for another hand hold. He's bleeding and sweating, and he's a soot-faced child throwing bottles at clone troopers; he's searching for his father in a screaming crowd; he's sixteen and standing in front of a man who says he's with the Rebel Alliance and promises purpose; he's telling Tivik it's alright just before he shoots him.

He's in the snow with his mother, watching her braids swing against her back.

Cassian can't afford to lose focus, not here, swaying so close to the top of the tower, fighting the kind of draining weakness that would drive him back to the floor, that would leave Jyn undefended. For all that he's been here before and clawed his way out, this time it matters more than ever. This is singular. Jyn's name beats like a pulse under his skin. There is no room for other thoughts.

A hissing, beating sound like doors in constant motion is coming from above, growing louder the higher he gets. He can't spare the energy to look up as he climbs, so he sees it only when he reaches the very top of the data banks: the ceiling is comprised of several layers of vents, opening and closing in a pattern designed to suck out warm air. They move with a speed that Cassian is no longer capable of, not with the hole in his side, not with his leg hanging heavy, barely able to support any weight. Cassian is trembling so close to the top of the Citadel tower, and he might as well be still on the ground.

He can climb. He's climbed this far. But he can't make it through there.

Icy ventilation puffs out around his fingers; he presses his forehead to the metal box of some unknown Imperial plan and breathes, his vision swimming.

“Come on,” he hisses. “Come on.”

His mother had died before his father had started protesting the Galactic Republic, and Cassian was never told whether the two things were connected. He barely remembers her as she lived, for all that he dreams about her, nevermind how she had left the world. He remembers his father's death vividly: a grenade, a spray of snow as if someone very large had jumped into a nice, fluffy bank. Cassian hates the cold. Cold metal handles underneath his palms. K2 lost in the floors below, gone cold now. Jyn somewhere up above, with the Imperial forces coming after her, and him unable to reach. Cold.

His mother had believed in the Force; his father had not. Cassian has always believed in what he can do with his own hands, but he needs some help now. He thinks of Chirrut, somewhere on the beach below, chanting to himself.

“I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me.”

It doesn't sound right in his mouth, so he says her name instead—it's only words, and it's all the same now. He pulls himself up, as close as he can to the first pulsing vent door. His entire body burns like the thick of a fever, like winters on Fest. He keeps his eyes open and watches the doors.

It's not tears or exhaustion warping his vision anymore.

He's sitting beside a woman in white in a cell, and a stormtrooper opens the door and takes off his helmet. He's standing in the Rebel base and a young man in a bright orange flight suit is talking to a blue droid underneath an x-wing. He's in the control room with Mon Mothma and everyone is screaming in a way that means something other than fear.

His body is warmer than before. The vent pulses open and somehow Cassian is moving—somehow he's through. It feels like someone is shoving a poker into his side, twisting, like a creature has set its teeth into his leg and is trying to pull him down. He's through the first vent, waiting. Sweat turns his vision glossy; he speaks her name like an oath.

Cassian's sitting next to Bodhi in a cockpit, flying somewhere they have never been before. Bodhi's eyes look clear. Cassian's in the hangar bay, shoulder to shoulder with Baze, and they're watching Chirrut spar with the young man from before, both of them moving with the same unnatural assuredness. Cassian's on a planet as cold as Fest, and Jyn is there at his shoulder, and in this world he knows her.

The next vent yawns open, and Cassian is through. He can barely feel the pain, not over the rush of time unfolding in his entire body. He's aching not because of wounds, but because he's lived through this, he's lived through years and years beyond this moment—all of them stack in on him at once, smothering him, lifting him, like arms, like Jyn or Draven or his parents have extended their hands down towards him and are carrying him now to the top of the tower. To the plans and hope and her.

He's yelling for her on a battlefield in a snowy plain of ice, her out of sight and his heart in his throat, because in this time he's had the chance to know her, and he knows that she will never turn down a fight, that she hates small spaces, that she dreams of her parents sometimes the way he does. He's ducking under an explosion to get to her side on another planet, and then, on the next, he's waving for her to charge forward ahead of him, because even if it means he can't breathe, he trusts her to do this. He trusts her finally, and he's watching her smile at a joke over rationed food; communicating with her in only a glance across a crowded bar; distracting her after a failed mission by sitting next to her while her hands shake, and telling her about the stars on Fest and his mother now up there with them.

Cassian is still saying her name when the vent door slides open, and it raises him up. There's only the shuddering open and close of the doors below him and then air below that. Everything falls: K2, Saw's man in Jedha from the point of Cassian's gun, the ship on Eadu, Cassian from the databanks down. There's one vent left, and he can see the sky beyond, a blue broken only by a thread of smoke—a single fighter.

He's falling again, in the wake of a triumph and staring at Jyn punching her fist in the air only a few steps away from him, dirty and grinning and so fiercely alive it takes the air out of his chest. He's coughing up blood in her arms, and she's got her hand on his face, even though she touches so few people. He's caught in a swell of adrenaline on the quietest day they've gotten in weeks, watching her profile as she watches the sun at the edge of the horizon. He gets to stay in this moment longer than any yet—has the time to catch her eye, then catch her mouth in a kiss, as soft as he can manage with his blood pushing up hot beneath his skin. He's trembling, but for once it's not because he's hurt. She surges up into his mouth with a sound like hunger, like surprise, like she knows. Their foreheads press together; he says her name against her cheek.

“Jyn.”

For the first time in his life, Cassian Andor knows he's going to love something other than the Alliance. He makes it through the vent and out into the sky.

****

He is just in time.

The man in white—the Imperial—has his blaster pointed at Jyn, who has nowhere to run, stranded out on the edge of a mangled strip of metal that was once a catwalk. Cassian doesn't think, and his hand doesn't shake. He breathes; takes the shot. The man falls. Stardust is safe.

Jyn turns and sees Cassian. A thousand words flash between them in one glance, too quick for Cassian to understand any of them. There's no time for relief or reunion now—she runs past the fallen man to a control panel, and pulls a lever.

“Transmitting.”

Cassian would laugh if he could. Jyn turns to him and smiles the same way she had only minutes before, in the vents, when her mouth was inches from his own. It seems like a dream now. It's fading, but she stumbles towards him, and she is the realest thing he's ever touched, shuddering and certain. She holds him up when he finally lets himself fall. His body is remembering the pain hiding underneath the adrenaline, and it wants her solidity.

“Do you think anybody's listening?” he asks, looking to the sky. There's no way to see the plans beaming up into space, no assurance at all.

“I do,” she says quietly. “Someone's out there.”

And as she says it, it becomes true. Cassian looks away from the sky and back to her.

She pulls him to the turbolift.

****

The life he lived in the vents is gone now. The lights of the turbolift pass over Jyn's face, bright bands flaring across her eyes and her mouth, and the impossible feeling of it echoes in his chest. He could tell her, but it doesn't seem to matter here. Her shoulder presses into the underside of his arm where it drapes around her. His hand hangs against her back; it moves with every breath she takes. She looks so human, so like someone he knows.

He has been lied to, he realizes. He's not going to get to see what happens from here, to see Bodhi and Baze and Chirrut ever again. He's not going to fight anymore. He's not going to have the time to know Jyn Erso and reach that moment in the sunset.

He could feel betrayed, but such intensity is lost to him now. He chooses instead to see it as a gift.

He gave her the chance to get the plans out, and they're here now, tipped together and hurting in tandem. He was going to love her one day. It's not absolution for the things he's done, and it's not anything he deserves, but he was going to get the chance to feel that. Just not in this world.

It's enough that she's here now, looking up at him, with the weight of the plans gone from her belt, the weight of it all beamed up into the sky.

Cassian remembers his mother's eyes as open and happy, nothing like the glimpse of Galen Erso's that he got through sheets of rain and a sniper scope. Jyn's father had the same eyes as her, and Cassian knew the look in his own was closer to theirs than his mother's. He'd often thought that no one who had known the Cassian of five years old would know him now. Here in the turbolift, it feels like that's changed. They are weightless together; they've lived their lives in a strange parallel, abandoned and lost children who have fought their whole lives, and are only now able to be on the same page, recognizing and recognized.

Jyn doesn't speak. He's glad for it.

****

On the beach, he takes her hand and she laces their fingers together. Her palm is rough against his. The light at the horizon is not a sunset but he still gets to hold her. God, it hurts, exhaustion and pain pulling at him to just stay down, but he gets to hold her, and he's not giving that up. One more gift. One more moment.

He's on his knees in the sand, and she's in his arms. It's warmer than Fest should be. Over a distant, tremulous rumble he thinks he hears his mother's voice. Jyn's cheek is wet against his own, and she holds him tighter with every second. He spreads his hand on her back, blindly feeling. He is so glad she's here. She feels like stardust.

When the light touches them, they become it together.


End file.
